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:: xxi :: Author's Preface It is partly true that Kimble County, Texas—isolated by nature and passed over by unfolding events of the 1870s—was founded by outlaws. It is wholly true that a few dozen mostly law-abiding settler-citizens, supported by Texas Rangers, struggled against an entrenched confederation of criminals for more than five years before a lawful, functioning local government was finally established in the eastern Edwards Plateau country. At first, Texas Rangers of the Frontier Battalion spearheaded the fight against the extortionary criminal element that populated the forks of the Llano River, the region where the east-flowing North Llano River joins the northeast-flowing South Llano. Gradually, however, fearful citizens organized and asserted themselves , taking on increasingly responsible and dangerous roles, assisting in apprehending and eventually helping to eliminate the outlaws. They understood that before the rule of law could exist, order must first be established. Frontier communities might endure ongoing criminal depredations with forbearance for a time. Long-suffering, however, they were likely to eventually rise up and exact a grim reckoning from their tormentors. In the closing years of the Kimble County struggle, an exasperated state finally and imperfectly imposed its punishment on the leading outlaws. The adjacent community then wreaked a grim and lawless final reckoning on the last of the renegades, cloaking the deed for public view in the accoutrements of legality. One purpose of this book is to document how order—followed by its handmaiden , the rule of law—finally came to Kimble County, Texas, and to the adjacent counties around the eastern margins of the Edwards Plateau. It reinforces some of the timeless verities concerning the establishment and maintenance of law-abiding civil societies by their citizens. Many of these principles are as applicable today as they were 135 years ago. The other purpose is simply to tell a fascinating, heroic, and tragic tale, one with many twists and turns, about contending people—settlers and Indians, lawmen and outlaws—in a time of great change near the end of the Texas frontier period. Author’s Preface :: xxii Following the 1977 reprinting of Walter Prescott Webb’s classic, The Texas Rangers : A Century of Frontier Defense, originally published in 1935, a number of excellent books have been written about the Texas Rangers, especially during the last decade: Frederick Wilkins’s The Law Comes to Texas: The Texas Rangers, 1870– 1901 (1999); Charles M. Robinson III’s The Men Who Wear the Star: The Story of the Texas Rangers (2000); Robert M. Utley’s Lone Star Justice: The First Century of Texas Rangers (2002); Chuck Parsons and Donaly Brice’s Texas Ranger N. O. Reynolds , the Intrepid (2005); Mike Cox’s The Texas Rangers: Wearing the Cinco Peso, 1821–1900 (2008), a modern reprise of Webb’s original, The Texas Rangers; and Bob Alexander’s Winchester Warriors: Texas Rangers of Company D, 1874–1901, (2009). Although all these fine books used a variety of historical sources, they depended primarily on the remarkable body of primary source material—Monthly Returns, correspondence, rosters, and administrative papers of the Texas Rangers , particularly of the Frontier Battalion—preserved in the archives of the Texas State Library. These books are mostly about the men and deeds of the Texas Rangers , and they tend to present generally favorable perspectives of this venerable law-enforcement organization. Other recent works have presented more negative views about the Rangers, before 1874 when the Frontier Battalion was established , especially in relation to their treatment of Indians, blacks, and Mexicans, such as revisionist historian Gary C. Anderson’s The Conquest of Texas: Ethnic Cleansing in the Promised Land (2005) and Michael Collins’s Texas Devils: Rangers and Regulars on the Lower Rio Grande (2008). The present book, too, draws extensively on the Texas Ranger files, but it is not primarily about the Texas Rangers. It relates and explains how a unique region in the western Hill Country of Texas—long delayed in its settlement because it lay isolated between east-reaching lobes of the Edwards Plateau1 —struggled to evolve into an organized county governed by its citizens and the rule of law. It traces the civil evolution of a nascent frontier society still visited by Indian raiders to an emerging, still-fragile civil community. It is about the settlers of Kimble County, law-abiding citizens as well as members of the outlaw confederation, and their counterparts in neighboring counties. In integrating the story from the Texas Ranger historical records with the histories...

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